Hatred Video Game Trailer

If You Love Video Games, Don't Play This New Insanely Violent Shooter

The real problem for video games as a whole, though, is closer to something I’ve already written about, #GamerGate. Men who grew up with games are seeing a dearth of titles focusing on time-sensitive, tactics-based gameplay. The designers behind Hatred don’t bother being polite and politically correct because they’re designing for a very narrow demographic — white men who want to shoot things. In their mind, this demographic doesn’t suffer from the traumas that plague the “fairer sexes” and “oppressed races.” It is not that there are fewer of these games — let me be clear — it is that mainstream games journalism cares less. How many times can you write about a man shooting a man in the face, particularly when there are radical games about, say, being a flower petal floating in the winds of new motion control or manipulating time itself in order to beat a level? It takes legitimately desperate measures to make this kind of violent video game newsworthy in today’s games media climate. And Hatred is just that — a desperate measure.

And yet here we are. It turns out that men shooting people in the face is the great innovation that Hatred has brought to the table (except for the dozenshundreds thousands of games which have already done it). Now, websites such as Polygon, Kotaku and GameSpot score hits with moral-panic pieces and force other news sources such as Forbes, Metro (and AskMen) to address the hubbub, giving free press to sh*tty video games that would otherwise just fail from lack of hype, die lonely in a corner and protect society from wasting time on games that don’t matter. Instead, we can expect Hatred to release relatively soon (Q2 2015, if the trailer is to be believed), to make good on the media hype and have a few hundred thousand people play it and further the pre-existing boy’s club gun-culture of video games.

If you like violent video games, don't play Hatred. Don't reward its makers for making an uninspired first-person shooter retread whose only noteworthy achievement is being more shockingly violent than the next FPS. Instead, try something like Hotline Miami. This top-down shooter uses the filmic aesthetic of ultraviolence and juxtaposes it an incredible musical score, neo-retro graphics, and a whole lot of goddamn color — in this case, ‘80s neon. At least it's doing something worth noticing, and not relying on amorality for press.